Convictions and cheap car insurance

If you are searching for a cheap car insurance deal, you will probably have come across the question "Have you had any convictions in the last five years?"

All motor insurance companies will ask this because it can have an effect on the level of risk you present. Someone with even just one speeding conviction is more likely to have an accident and need to call on their cheap car insurance provider to pay for repairs and other costs than someone with no convictions at all.

To be specific, research by online car insurance company Esure on its own customers revealed that a single speeding conviction puts up the chance of a motor insurance claim within a year by 12%.

If you have been convicted of any driving offence, whether it is drink driving or speeding, you are very likely to see an increase in your motor insurance premiums for a minimum of five years. Once five years is up, many driving convictions - including speeding - will be considered to be "spent" and will no longer have an effect on your ability to get cheap car insurance.

Is it possible to get cheap car insurance after a driving conviction?
Most motor insurance firms look at risk factors differently. One will give a greater weighting to a factor such as age or gender, whilst another will put emphasis on the type of car driven or where it is kept.

Similarly, the effect that a conviction can have on a cheap car insurance premium will differ greatly between motor insurance companies.

Each year, at least 2 million drivers in the UK get convicted of driving offences, many of which were caught speeding. Since the 1992 introduction of speed cameras the number of drivers who get convicted of speeding has risen dramatically and this group of motorists currently stands in the millions.

Some motor insurance companies are very strict about how they treat drivers with speeding convictions. These firms will immediately stop offering cheap car insurance and drivers will see their motor insurance rate leap up with every three points that they accumulate on their licence. Some firms won't even offer any car insurance whatsoever to someone who has more than two driving convictions.

However, a speeding conviction doesn't necessarily mean that a cheap car insurance quote is totally out of the question. There are some car insurance companies that allow for the fact so many drivers have been caught just over the limit. If you have a single conviction, these firms will usually raise your premium a little but not nearly as much as the motor insurance companies with a strict conviction policy.

There are even a few motor insurance firms that will distinguish between degrees of infringement, giving you different rates depending whether you have been caught 5 mph or 30 mph over the limit.

Most companies won't look on two or more speeding convictions quite so leniently though and the chances are that cheap car insurance quotes will be thin on the ground for some time if this is your situation.

A conviction for drunk driving, on the other hand, will be treated severely by all motor insurance firms. The majority of cheap car insurance firms will be very reluctant to insure drink drivers as they pose too much of a risk. A small number of companies specialise in car insurance for convicted drivers, however, and although this won't be cheap, it will at least be insurance.

Remember: you must declare convictions
If you have a driving conviction and you are thinking that it would just be easier not to declare it when signing up to a new motor insurance policy, don't go down this road. You have a duty to declare your convictions under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974.

If you fail to do this, you will not be insured even if you pay for a motor insurance policy, making it rather pointless to lie about your conviction.

Normally, you will not need to give details of any spent convictions when you are filling out a motor insurance quote form. However, some companies may word a question in such a way that you have to give details of all convictions, spent or not, and it will again invalidate your car insurance policy if you fail to release this information.

A sure-fire way to get cheap car insurance
Whether you have motoring convictions or your licence is clean, why not get a motor insurance quote from duck2water and see just how cheap our policies are?

As we are an online motor insurance firm, we are able to specialise in really cheap car insurance. We don't pump millions of pounds into advertising, as many other insurance companies do, nor do we have a huge, expensive-to-run call centre. Instead, most of our customers find us either through searching online or via word of mouth and get their cheap car insurance quotes online.

We transform our savings into really low cost motor insurance for you, meaning that our quotes are a lot cheaper than many other so-called cheap car insurance firms around.

It is incredibly quick and easy to get a motor insurance quote with us because we have designed our online quotation system to be incredibly straightforward to use. Finding out just how cheap car insurance is with us shouldn't take more than 3 minutes from start to finish, so why not give it a go?

Get a cheap car insurance quote now and save up to 25%.

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